Community Responses to Disaster: Northern Ireland 1969 as a Case Study

Abstract

Disasters are moments when the social fabric is torn. When lives are turned upside-down, when expectations about how life works are confounded; routines are disrupted; everything is thrown into turmoil. Although disasters have personal implications they are always communal or even national. Disasters bring disorder, chaos, disruption. They are moments of breakdown, catastrophe, destruction, devastation, tragedy, and trauma. In a disaster nothing is normal. Norms are ruptured, and there is a breakdown in the order of things. The patterns of normal everyday life are dislocated, ruptured, corrupted, and even destroyed. Disasters, whatever else they might be, are not ordinary events.